How Trump used Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' to Overcome the Media in 2016.

'Every battle is won before it is fought'

-Sun Tzu

It is worth remembering the gargantuan task that stood before Trump in '15, not only did he have to beat, what Charles Krauthammer called?'the best republican field in 35 years', consisting of then Governor Jeb Bush; two rising stars in Cruz and Rubio, and a brain surgeon in Carson, but he also went up against the vaunted 'Clinton Machine', the DNC, Hollywood, the music industry, and arguably the greatest obstacle to his ambitions - the media.

He even managed to?pick a fight?with Republican-friendly Fox News and was at his most scathing when launching counter-attacks against former Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Even the Pope piled in and?had his say?after Trump unfurled a media firestorm by criticising illegal crossings on the US southern border. It was the world against Trump.

Curiously, these whirlwinds of controversy did not sweep his campaign away. On the contrary, whenever Trump was at his most controversial, that's when his campaign grew. As Sean Hannity put it?'he defies conventional political gravity'.

Most Republican strategists at the time would not have recommended Trump's approach, the conventional wisdom amongst these circles went something like, 'don't mention abortion, women's rights, or immigration'.

For if you ventured into that territory then the vultures in the media will circle you, isolate you, pressurise your donors, and destroy you through a constant barrage of vituperations that would eventually lead to a defeated and emasculated candidate walking onto a stage to issue a grovelling apology. You were supposed to steer away from controversy, not purposely fuel it.

In light of this, and 5 years on from his inauguration, what explanations have been put forward for this remarkable victory? Some said Clinton did not campaign enough in key swing states like?Wisconsin. The whole of the 'Democrat Media Complex' ran PR for the Democrat party by pushing the idea that Russian interference was why he won. Forbes credited?Jared Kushner. Some invoked?divine intervention.

But before you appeal to the supernatural for an explanation, you must first exhaust the natural. And there's one person who to this day has never fully received the credit he deserves. And that person is Donald Trump. Surely he could not have masterminded the election win? it had to be some other sinister agent(s), like Putin or Cambridge Analytica.

How could this unsophisticated, obnoxious billionaire - this odious bully from Queens, New York, who went to war against the most powerful influences in America - including his own Republican establishment, become the 45th President on his first attempt? How was he victorious, when in total, 500 major publications endorsed Clinton & only 28 backed Trump?

The most widely circulated newspaper, USA Today, which had not made a voting recommendation in 34 years declared that Trump was ‘unfit for the Presidency’.

The Atlantic, who had only made two previous endorsements; Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Lyndon B Johnson in 1964, endorsed Clinton and attacked Trump by calling him a racist, sexist, xenophobic authoritarian.

The New York Times, infamously and inaccurately, estimated that Clinton had an 85% chance of winning the race to the White House.

A clarion call had been declared by America’s intelligentsia; from coast to coast, all had to unite against this existential threat that stood to?destroy their Republic.

To the media and the establishment, Trump was the accidental billionaire, who according to his critics, only got rich because of his father's political and financial connections. It was the same story when Trump became president. He was the accidental President, who through some extraordinary sequences of fortuitous events ended up inside the oval office presiding over an immense nuclear arsenal and the most powerful military in the history of the world.

Until now, the process of how he got there has only been explained through a prism of snobbish cynicism.

It’s still a relative mystery of how he managed to pull off arguably the greatest shock in election history.

Knowing Trump

Know a man's heroes and you will know how he will govern. That is the dictum that I have followed when attempting to predict the outcome of decisions made by the most powerful person on earth. For example, it was no surprise to me that the Islamic State formed under Obama’s presidency. Outside his meticulously curated media image of a charming moderate centrist, Obama was a radical, whose extremism was only hampered, restricted & frustrated by the checks and balances built into the US constitution.

His religious mentor was the heretical preacher, Jeremiah Wright (1941 -), who espoused the morally deficient and self-refuting 'blowback theory' on US foreign policy. His intellectual hero was Saul Alinsky (1909-72) and he was heavily influenced by Edward Said (1935-03).

By all reasonable, rational, balanced standards, all three men had twisted and warped world-views. Saul Alinsky's,?Rules for Radicals?(1971), is a machiavellian & Marxist-inspired manual of pure manipulation and deception.

Academic, Edward Said, who inside most universities across the west enjoys cult-like reverence for his illogical and incomprehensible ramblings in Orientalism (1978), was so dangerous that he was correctly dubbed the "Professor of Terror'.

With careful objective analysis of these men and their published works and through filtering that information through my own qualitative predictive models, I was able to correctly?predict?that if Obama was elected in 2012, then an Islamic Caliphate would follow (I’m not claiming he did this knowingly, it was the unintended consequences of a defective worldview). I made the following prediction two years before ‘Caliph’ Abu Baker al-Baghdadi officially declared the founding of his totalitarian state.

Know a man's heroes and you will know how he will govern.

And so I set out to do the same with Trump. After he made his announcement speech I wanted to know how he would govern. But I also wanted to understand what on earth he was doing?

Why was this once professional, widely respected ‘Rockefeller Republican’ type, who in the 1980s was encouraged by mainstream darling Oprah Winfrey to run for President, now deploying rhetoric that had no filter?

Why was Trump, who in the ‘The Apprentice’ fired people for making impulsive, emotionally driven “reckless” decisions now riling up America?

Was this the same man who I heard give management advice like ‘Never lose your temper unless it serves a purpose’?

These two contradictory versions of the same figure were irreconcilable. Trump, the politician had now somehow lost control of his emotions? Did he not know that the media will attempt to crucify him?

Like I did with Obama, I set out to understand Trump’s worldview (I paid no attention to the media) and began to read his own thoughts in his books. The first book I read was?'The Art of the Deal'?(1987), which, contrary to his rambunctious, obnoxious, and belligerent media image, painted a portrait of a sophisticated individual who possessed deft touches inside negotiation settings; buttressed by an acute sense of detail and prey/predator like awareness of any room he stepped into.

But this only compounded the problem, where was this control during his campaign?

In search of his influences and heroes, I then came across his book,?'Think Like a Champion'?(2009). Inside its pages, I discovered a reading list that he had compiled for aspiring entrepreneurs and a recommendation that they understand?'The Art of War' (5 BC). These are his observations on Sun Tzu's classic text:

After I read?The Art of War?(for the first time), I revisited 'The Art of the Deal'?and on my second reading, I noticed something.

There was an imperceptible extra dimension to his words. In the book, I saw Sun Tzu's influence; it became apparent to me that Sun Tzu's teachings were impressed into Trump's thinking. It was like holding up the pages to a light and seeing Sun Tzu's classic appear underneath the black ink.

For example, Tzu writes:?'In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity’.?Now read this passage from?The Art of the Deal?where Trump explains the inspiration behind his first major project in 1980 - the renovation of the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Plaza Hotel. Look out for where you can notice the quote above from The Art of War.

Did you see it?

‘The city was on the verge of bankruptcy, but what I saw was a superb location’

In the midst of chaos?(bankruptcy),?there is opportunity?(a superb location).

That’s almost a perfect manifestation of Sun Tzu.

To the inquisitive eye, ‘The Art of War’ is to ‘The Art of the Deal’ to what David Lean’s?Lawrence of Arabia?(1962) is to Spielberg’s?Raiders of the Lost Ark?(1981) or to what a Norman Rockwell painting is to Zemeckis’?Forrest Gump?(1994). The influences are unquestionable. Not only do they inform you that they are shaped by them, but it shows in their work. After you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The 'Art of War' is the blueprint - the foundation out from which Trump's high-rise empire grew.

The environment that he chose to operate in was fraught with danger, and contrary to the media's characterisation of Trump - and his own deliberate fanning of it (more on this next week) - childish, thin-skinned, wild, impulsive, pride-filled men don't become billionaires in arguably the toughest real estate market on earth, in a place, which at that time was dubbed 'fear city' because of rampant corruption, unprecedented police strikes, skyrocketing criminality, and a construction industry riddled with organised crime present in the form of the Genovese family's hold on the concrete industry.

Now at this point, there will be many people who doubt that Trump is a practitioner of Sun Tzu. That person is probably projecting an impression onto Trump sketched by the media. That person has not developed their own view. They’ve adopted someone else’s. The media’s. It’s not their own; it second-hand information; fragments and snippets of Trump saying something wild,?followed up by the subtle condemning and serious tone from a news reporter.?Or a segment of a documentary that show the viewer a photo of Trump captured in a sinister pose; cue ominous music played purposely to invoke unease in the viewer.

Voters getting information about a candidate from the media are like Christians getting their theology from a priest before the reformation. In order to develop an objective view - as I’ve already set out - one must read the subjects’ words for themselves and bypass the establishment middleman.

For Trump, who attended New York Military Academy, reading and being exposed to military strategies like?‘The Art of War’?or Clausewitz’s?‘On War’?would be a standard text for students like him to consume.

There is little doubt that Trump is a disciple and a practitioner of Sun Tzu, here are some tweets I managed to preserve after his ousting from Twitter:

This last tweet underpinned his foreign policy and his commitment to put an end to the 'endless wars' of the United States.

'Know the Enemy'

So how does this relate to Donald Trump 2016 election strategy? Let us take a look at Sun Tzu's famous instruction:

Let's focus on the first part of this instruction, 'know the enemy'. In the context of the 2016 election, the "enemy" here was the mainstream media ( you can substitute ‘enemy’ for any obstacle). Knowing the enemy is a crucial aspect of forming a strategy. One must engage in objective analysis of the 'enemy' or your competitor, and avoid the pitfalls that have resulted in terrible failures in intelligence collection in the past. For example, the British liberal weekly press’ deadly projection of perceived grievances cast onto the Nazi regime and their subsequent failure to warn Britain of the legitimate dangers the Nazis posed to Europe.

Knowing the enemy well is the ability to drill down to the essence of their being. Trump, who was operating from an inherently conservative outlook, drilled down to the core of the media's being:

Controversy sells because humans are inherently attracted to it. That is perhaps an unfortunate but wholly inescapable fact of the human condition. The highest selling newspapers are the editions that cover some calamitous event. The highest selling book of all time - The Bible, at its centre, focuses on the unjust and wrongful conviction of a Galilean preacher who was viciously crucified for speaking the truth. Our most loved films and stories are the ones that are filled with conflict and controversy following a clash between a protagonist and antagonist. We cannot help but look and we cannot look away.

In his book?‘Trump-Style Negotiation: Powerful Strategies and Tactics for Mastering Every Deal’?(2006) George H. Ross, former VP and Senior Counsel of the Trump Organisation, elaborated on the value of generating controversy within a media strategy:

“Sometimes, publicity is more important than short term profits, because that visibility opens up so many long term doors. This is the Trump vision, the ‘Bigger Picture’ that makes the difference between ordinary success and spectacular success’

By 2015/16 Trump had years of experience deploying this strategy. In the election, the controversy he stoked attracted the media's cameras which fueled free publicity for his campaign. It opened up the opportunity for him to speak to a wider audience. It made the ‘difference between ordinary success and spectacular success.'

This tactic was perfectly utilised in this passage of Trump's announcement speech which he purposely chose to deliver during the quiet summer months of the news cycle:

“When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

It’s important to remember what friend and associate, Piers Morgan?observed:

“He may sound a little bonkers occasionally, but everything he does is deliberate”.

The media took the bait, or as Sun Tzu said 'Hold out baits, to entice the enemy'?and they had no choice but to cover what they thought was a racist, sexist, misogynistic, rich, white Republican - their business model is entirely dependent on covering that controversy. Controversy generates attention, and attention generates profit, without a profit, they potentially cease to exist.

Once he attracted the attention of every major news publication in America, he pivoted and focused on selling his message to the American voter - another skill he had already perfected by the late 1980s. The result? By the end of the election, the New York Times reported that Trump had received?$2 billion worth of free media.

Seasoned political strategist, Roger Stone, wrote:

'Trump was following a basic principle known to professional political operatives and campaign advisors - namely, dominate the media, even if what the media is saying about you is negative.'

Stunningly, for many on the left and centre, including Democrat strategists working on the Clinton campaign, this is exactly where they wanted Trump. From their perspective, they wrongly concluded that the controversy that Trump was stoking would eventually lead to his destruction. The following ‘Wikileaks’ email written by Democrat operatives lays out what they called the 'Pied Piper' strategy. A strategy designed to defeat Republicans.

One cannot help but marvel at the jaw-dropping incompetence. Hillary Clinton and her team actively encouraged their friends in the media to cover his campaign. They purposely?elevated?Trump, thinking Americans would be repelled by his "extremism" and deal him a strong blow that would eventually lead to his inevitable downfall. But in reality, when they encouraged the press to take Trump seriously, they gifted him free media coverage, and unknowingly propelled him towards the Presidency. It is no wonder they were so shocked on the night of the election. So staggered were they of the result that Hillary was unable to make a concession speech.

What Trump had done, which they had not, was to diligently conduct research in order to intimately understand the angst Americans were feeling.

‘Know Yourself'

Stirring up controversy for the sake of it is not a good media strategy. The saying 'all publicity is good publicity’ is a reckless one to live by if one hasn't weighed up the downsides - especially in a post-Obama era of ‘cancel culture’, boycotts, riots & mob mentality.

This is where Sun Tzu's?'know yourself'?comes into play.

Know yourself in Sun Tzu's context would be to know your army. But in the business/political context, it is the ability to know your audience/voter. I do not mean understanding the masks that people wear - their personas, I mean acquiring an intimate knowledge of people. In other words, what would a subject's anonymous Twitter account say as opposed to the image they put up of themselves on LinkedIn?

By 2016, Trump already had decades of experience of knowing his audience. Knowing your audience in the business setting focuses the mind to be cold and objective - there is little room for error. Error could mean financial calamity. So knowing what the audience wants is an indispensable part of the formula that leads to success. For Trump, his audience has always been the masses and here he explains the importance of conducting his own market research:

Even early on his career, Trump was not swayed by what critics said about him, he was only focused on what the masses desired:

It’s clear he values bypassing industry experts and him conducting his own research and that of course was the method he followed going into the 2016 elections. It's not possible to know everything he did for audience research but what we do know is that, at a minimum, he read two books: Ann Coulter's,?Adios America?(2015), where she argued her case for America to have a wall and or a fence (‘Why Can’t We Have Israel’s Policy on Immigration’ Ch.8) and Rick Santorum’s?Blue Collar Conservative?(2014), where he would have read "As many as six million blue collar voters stayed home from the polls, and there's good reason to believe that a large majority of them would have voted Republican if they had voted”.

Rick Santorum recollected an interaction with Trump after he realised the billionaire had read his book:

In the summer of 2014, Trump asked me to stop by his office the next time I was in Manhattan... When we walked into his office, he was sitting behind his desk holding a copy of my book?Blue Collar Conservatives?that I had published that spring. The first thing he said was, 'I read your book.'I laughed. 'The hell you read my book.'

Trump shot back, 'I did; it was great!'

So I quizzed him on the message in my book that the great middle of America was hollowing out as a result of big-government policies that were helping the elites but leaving blue-collar families behind. And to my great surprise, Trump passed my test with flying colors. We discussed the problems facing Middle America specifically the implications of unfettered globalization on American manufacturing and its effect on wages for blue-collar families.The real estate mogul not only got it, he was as upset as I was that these families were being left behind. He said he might run for president and, if he did, he wanted to take that message to the American voter and did he ever.”

Trump conducted this research phase of his campaign so well that he was able to channel the voice of politically disenfranchised voters and became the candidate who said what they were thinking, culminating in him declaring on stage at the Republican National Convention that "I am your voice".

That is not to say that Trump cynically exploited the hopes and fears of disaffected voters in America. His tough stance on illegal immigration dates back to his 2000 book 'The America We Deserve', his?opposition?to endless wars goes back to 2004, and his uncompromising?views on trade?go back to the late '80s.

It took time for the rest of America to catch up and for the full ramifications of globalist policies to produce the fruit that they did. (As Sun Tzu said,?to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.?We heard about the issue of illegal?immigration in 2016 but that was merely a thunderclap to the lightning that came?down years earlier in the form of immigration law.)

This is why the barrage of criticism that followed Trump's controversial comments was just noise to him. He didn’t have to quit his campaign after multiple incidents, even when he was outmaneuvered and an Access Hollywood tape was leaked, catching this infamous line on a hot mic:

‘ I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the p****.

Unlike George W. Bush, McCain, and Romney, who all were bullied by press furor and indelibly marked by it, to the extent that they became disconnected to the grassroots of America*, Trump was unfazed, unmoved, and unaffected by ensuing media firestorms because he knew his audience and never lost sight of them.

Trump understood that when the camera was fixed on him and a mainstream journalist was excoriating him for his worldview, the only audience that mattered were the people on the other side of the camera, not the critics, but the people inside their homes who were disaffected by trade, who had grave concerns about immigration and were deeply troubled by the United States' interventionist foreign policy. He was as branders, say ‘on message’ at all times.

He built his message out from the?perspective of the audience, not out from the vantage point of Republican and Democrat political consultants based in Washington D.C., or the media, but the type of voters who were economically devastated by the decisions that took place on Capitol Hill.

That is what great marketers and communicators have always known: you don't build a bridge between yourself and the customer, you build out your message from the perspective of the customer.

As?Steve Jobs?said:

And one of the things I’ve always found is that ... you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

What the media and the political establishment perceived as deadly controversy is what the Republican voters in 2016 wanted their candidate to speak on. Of course, the Clinton campaign missed it, and so did the press:

“During the campaign, we tried to cover Donald Trump using the rules of the past, we didn’t have our finger on the pulse of the country, and that was wrong” -Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times. (Reporting Trump's First Year: The Fourth Estate?(BBC Two documentary)

Obama, who was an inept President - but by virtue of two powerful election victories was no doubt a high-class political campaigner, graciously conceded:

And you know, what’s clear is that he was able to tap into, yes, the anxieties but also the enthusiasm of his voters in a way that was impressive. And I said so to him because I think that to the extent that there were a lot of folks who missed the Trump phenomenon, I think that connection that he was able to make with his supporters, that was impervious to events that might have sunk another candidate. That’s powerful stuff.

Sun Tzu's,?'If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles',?was modified to become,?'If you know the media and know the voter you need not fear the result of a hundred media firestorms.’

Extraordinarily, even before he announced that he was running for the Presidency, Trump had plotted his way towards the White House and?predicted?that he would win by manipulating the media:

‘I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me....

…‘I’m going to walk away with it and win it outright"

As soon Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago,?'Every battle is won before it is fought.’

To the casual observer, Trump's approach of attacking everyone and everything seemed like madness, but it was all calculated. In other words, if it was detrimental to his chances of winning then he wouldn't have adopted the all-out war approach he had taken. It was all pre-planned.

*The media can take a Conservative, pro-states’ rights firebrand and turn them into hard-line internationalists. When he was governor of Texas, George W. Bush was asked by David Letterman why these strange southerners still persisted with the death penalty: “ We make a lot of jokes about electrocuting people in Texas” The Texan, in front of a left-wing New York audience (the type that would cry over Obama and Biden’s bromance and get their news from Jon Stewart) swatted Letterman’s question away; and defiantly and confidently proclaimed that as long as he was governor of Texas, he would uphold Texan law.?@9:55

Fast forward to the end of his 8 years, in 2008 after being pummelled and pulverised by the press over Iraq, the Patriot Act, and ‘Katrina’, his administration was arguing the diametric opposite of State’s rights and sided with the world court arguing that international law should supersede Texan law in?Texas vs Medillin.